Hefei Botanical Garden turns a climate crossroads into a biodiversity stronghold

Hefei Botanical Garden / Hefei Institute of Landscape Architecture; South China Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published in Biological Diversity (ISSN: 2994-4139).

Where subtropical warmth collides with temperate cold in eastern China, the climate transition zone around Hefei creates an unusually rich botanical crossroads. It is exactly the kind of place where species from two biomes overlap, compete, and sometimes vanish. It is also exactly the kind of place where a well-run botanical garden can punch above its weight.

A new commentary published in Biological Diversity lays out how Hefei Botanical Garden has done just that, building a conservation, research, and public education operation that now ranks among the most ambitious urban botanical programs in China.

5,000 species in a city's backyard

The numbers alone tell a striking story. By 2024, the garden had collected and preserved 4,012 plant species spanning 187 families and 815 genera. That figure has since climbed past the 5,000 mark, including roughly 200 species classified as rare or endangered. For a garden situated inside a mid-sized Chinese city rather than a remote nature reserve, those totals are significant.

Two genera anchor the collection strategy. Armeniaca mume (the flowering apricot long celebrated in Chinese art and horticulture) and Nelumbo nucifera (the sacred lotus) each have dedicated specialized gardens where curators maintain deep cultivar diversity. But the real conservation muscle lies elsewhere: in the ex situ programs for nationally protected trees.

Seventy-three species on China's national protection list are now growing in the garden's collections. One standout case is Sinojackia xylocarpa, a second-class protected tree in the Styracaceae family that struggles in fragmented wild habitat. The garden has successfully propagated more than 1,000 individuals, creating a viable backup population far from the pressures that threaten the species in situ.

Cleaning a lake, one wetland at a time

Conservation at Hefei goes beyond potted specimens and curated beds. The garden has taken on ecological restoration at landscape scale, targeting the degraded wetlands surrounding Chaohu Lake, one of the five largest freshwater lakes in China and one with a long history of pollution trouble.

Over the past several years, garden-led restoration work has reclaimed 200 hectares of degraded wetland around the lake. The results are measurable in water-quality data: readings improved from substandard Class V, the worst official category in China's surface-water grading system, to Class II or III, grades that indicate water suitable for drinking-water sources with standard treatment. That jump represents a dramatic reversal for ecosystems that were functionally dead.

Closer to home, the garden also upgraded 33 hectares of its own southern zone, transforming what had been an underused section into functional habitat. The combined effect is a patchwork of restored green infrastructure stretching from the garden's boundaries out into the broader Hefei watershed.

A botanical garden meets the village economy

Perhaps the most unusual dimension of Hefei's work is what the commentary authors call the "Botanical Garden + Agriculture" model. In 2019, the garden established a satellite research base in Changzhuang Village, building specialized demonstration gardens and trialing ornamental and economic plants suited to the local climate.

One notable trial involved Nymphaea rubra, a red water lily native to South Asia, which the team proved could overwinter naturally in the region's conditions, eliminating the costly indoor protection that normally limits water-lily cultivation in temperate-edge climates. The practical payoff: farmers and tourism operators can grow the plants without expensive infrastructure.

Under forest canopies in the village, the garden promotes intercropping of medicinal and ornamental species, a practice that generates income for farmers while maintaining canopy cover and the biodiversity it supports. In 2021, the program expanded to include rare medicinal and economic plants sourced from across East China, diversifying what was available for local cultivation.

The model is explicitly designed as a two-way exchange. The garden gains field sites and real-world cultivation data. The village gains landscape value, tourism draw, and new revenue streams. Whether it can scale beyond a single demonstration village remains an open question, but the early results suggest the concept has legs.

One million visitors and the AR museum

Hefei Botanical Garden holds designation as a national-level science education base, and it takes that title seriously. The garden operates a Science Museum equipped with augmented-reality interactive systems and a dedicated Nature Education Center. Together, these facilities have trained nearly 1,000 environmental education volunteers and hosted more than 10,000 participants in structured science activities.

The garden also holds status as a National Key Flower Culture Base, staging national-level floral exhibitions that draw more than one million visitors annually. A "Plant Adoption" program has enrolled over 5,000 participants, giving ordinary citizens a direct stake in the garden's conservation work.

These are not trivial numbers. Public botanical gardens often struggle to bridge the gap between serious science and accessible engagement. Hefei's approach, blending digital tools, volunteer infrastructure, and participatory programs, appears to be generating real traction with the urban public.

Gaps that remain

The commentary does not shy away from acknowledging what still needs doing. The authors note that germplasm coverage remains incomplete; the garden's collections, while large, do not yet represent the full floristic diversity of the subtropical-temperate transition zone. Research output, measured by publications and applied breeding advances, lags behind what the collection size would suggest is possible.

The future agenda outlined in the paper is ambitious. Priorities include systematic expansion of germplasm banks, the adoption of molecular breeding techniques to accelerate conservation-relevant propagation, and the construction of a "smart garden" using artificial intelligence and big data to manage collections, monitor health, and predict threats.

The garden is also part of global networks. It participates in Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI), the leading global body coordinating plant conservation among botanical gardens, and maintains collaborative agreements with institutions including Japan's Makino Botanical Garden. These partnerships bring access to expertise and genetic material that a single institution, however energetic, cannot generate alone.

An urban garden's outsized role

Botanical gardens have always occupied an ambiguous position in the conservation world. Critics point out that they are, at best, lifeboats: they can preserve genetic material but cannot protect ecosystems. Proponents counter that in a world of accelerating habitat loss, lifeboats matter enormously, especially when they double as research stations, public classrooms, and economic engines for surrounding communities.

Hefei Botanical Garden fits squarely in the proponent camp, and the scope of its ambitions suggests it is trying to make the lifeboat as large and functional as possible. Whether it can close the gaps in germplasm coverage and translate its collections into peer-reviewed science and applied breeding tools will determine how much influence it ultimately wields.

For now, the garden stands as a concrete example of what an urban botanical institution can accomplish when it integrates conservation, restoration, rural development, and public engagement into a single operational framework. In a country urbanizing as fast as China, that model may prove as valuable as any individual species it protects.